Ms. Hudes, 34, was a finalist in the Pulitzer drama category twice before, for “In the Heights” (with Lin-Manuel Miranda) and “Elliot, a Soldier’s Fugue.” The latter centered on a young Marine home from Iraq, who is once again the main character in “Water by the Spoonful,” the second in a trilogy of plays.

“Spoonful” pivots between Elliot’s adjustment to life back in Philadelphia, where he works in a sandwich shop, and a group of other characters sharing their own struggles in an online Narcotics Anonymous chat room. Researching the play, which is based on a cousin’s life, Ms. Hudes dipped into recovery meetings and found them “riveting and horrifying and funny as hell.”

The Pulitzer jury credited her with writing “an imaginative play about the search for meaning by a returning Iraq war veteran.”

Mr. Marable, who died in April 2011 at age 60, three days before this book was published, spent two decades researching the black nationalist leader’s transformation from petty criminal to separatist firebrand to mainstream Muslim preaching peace to, finally, martyr.

The book’s most startling, and hotly debated, claims involve Malcolm X’s assassination in 1965, which Mr. Marable describes as being abetted by law-enforcement authorities who “stood back” rather than investigate threats against his life.

In untangling the mythologies surrounding Malcolm X, including his own best-selling autobiography, Mr. Marable achieved what the citation called “a work that separates fact from fiction and blends the heroic and the tragic.”

Finalists: “Empires, Nations & Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1860,” by Anne F. Hyde (University of Nebraska Press); “The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama Bin Laden,” by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan (Ballantine Books); “Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America,” by Richard White (W.W. Norton & Company).

Mr. Gaddis, 71, first met Kennan in 1974 and agreed to be his biographer in 1981, on the condition that he would have complete access to Kennan’s extensive diaries and personal papers and that the book would not be published in the older man’s lifetime. (Kennan died in 2005 at age 101.)

“It was a biographer’s dream in many ways,” Mr. Gaddis said. “The only thing that really was unpredictable but caused him more grief than it did me was that he lived so long. For years, I was getting apologies from him.”

Ms. Smith celebrated her 40th birthday on Monday, the same day she won the Pulitzer Prize for her poetry collection “Life on Mars.” “It feels pretty amazing,” Ms. Smith said of the honor. “It kind of blunts the sting of a new decade.” The poems, which address personal grief and the entire universe, were strongly influenced by the death of her father, a scientist who had worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. “They’re poems that seek to reconcile our private losses and concerns with something that is more public — and beyond public,” she said. In The New York Times Book Review, Joel Brouwer called her “a poet of extraordinary range and ambition.”

Mr. Greenblatt, a professor of humanities at Harvard, was faced with a daunting challenge: how to make the discovery, 600 years ago, of a poem that was written more than 2,000 years ago come alive for a general audience.

“It’s the story of how our world took shape,” Mr. Greenblatt, 68, said. “For me, this was a way of trying to say to a lot of people — other than my students — why it matters that there was a Renaissance, and why we’re connected to it.”

MUSIC: Kevin Puts for “Silent Night: Opera in Two Acts,” commissioned and premiered by the Minnesota Opera in Minneapolis on November 12, 2011.

The Pulitzer Committee called “Silent Night” a versatile and stirring opera that cuts “straight to the heart.” Based on the 2005 movie “Joyeux Noël,” it tells the true story of spontaneous truce on Christmas in 1914 during World War I. Both sides shared chocolate, drinks and songs, Mr. Puts, 40, said. “Then, of course, they had to go back to killing each other.”

Finalists: Tod Machover for “Death and the Powers,” premiered by the Boston Modern Opera Project in Massachusetts on March 18, 2011; Andrew Norman for “The Companion Guide to Rome,” premiered on November 13, 2011, in Salt Lake City.

A version of this article appears in print on April 17, 2012, on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: 2012 Pulitzer Prizes for Letters, Drama and Music. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe